A New Approach of Remote Sensing Satellite Programs in Taiwan

As a space agency in Taiwan, NSPO is used to design satellites with good heritage of space-graded parts and components to reduce program risks. However, the local industrial companies were hard to get the chance to join the space programs in the past decades because they were not qualified vendors in the beginning. Taiwan's government would like NSPO to actively promote local space industry recently, so we try a different approach for the new remote sensing satellite program. The first step is to identify key components and core technologies that will be used in the future space program. The second step is to survey local companies and research institutes to find the potential partners for developing space products. The third step is to derive specifications and verification plan for those components that we want to develop. If the developed components can pass the qualification tests, they will be used in the new remote sensing satellite program. We try to minimize the hardware cost with COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) approach, so the overall cost of each satellite can be reduced. The new satellite platform will be treated as flight demonstration platform for the future mission satellites due to its low cost Any new components or new technologies will be verified with this platform. There are more than fifteen key components and technologies will be developed and verified. The latest development status are described in this paper.